


Under Torture

by bomberqueen17



Series: Meet Death Sitting [21]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Torture, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, yennefer pegs jaskier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:28:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29217987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: A direct sequel toAncient Sea: Yennefer and Jaskier discover the delights and pitfalls of a life of intrigue.
Relationships: Jaskier | Dandelion & Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: Meet Death Sitting [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639717
Comments: 45
Kudos: 182





	Under Torture

**Author's Note:**

> It's the one-year anniversary of my having posted the [first installment of Meet Death Sitting](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22572403). So indulge me, friends, and have here something I had been working on almost from the beginning, but never found time to work in: an interpretation of an event from the books, which I thought was marvellously juicy, and a bit of a tie-in of some of the loose ends raised in [Fugitive](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23670274).

Yennefer wasn’t a cottage-in-the-woods kind of witch. She could admire the aesthetic, certainly, and there was a quaint folkloric charm to it, but she was much more a city sorceress, and so instead she had a tasteful two-story townhouse with a retail front downstairs and a workshop in the back and a nice apartment upstairs for her to live in. She didn’t have a garden, didn’t do any cooking, didn’t have any chickens of her own, no livestock, no kitchen to speak of. Her neighbors were a barber shop on one side and a tailor’s shop on the other, and there was a tavern two doors down that delivered her meals to her when she was in residence so she never had to waste her own time on anything domestic. 

At the moment, it was also a fairly good unobtrusive hideout. She wasn’t hiding, exactly, but nobody important really expected her to be there. It only worked because she usually _wasn’t_ there.

So she couldn’t really hide anyone there, couldn’t protect anyone, but if she wanted to spend time there she was fairly safe.

And if she wanted to drag Jaskier away from the grubby, shabby squalor of Oxenfurt to more thoroughly demolish him there, well, that was safe enough, provided she gave enough notice that his Redanian Intelligence detachment didn’t have to break the cover of the competent rotation of agents currently watching him.

They’d had to leave Kaer Morhen on schedule, of course; Jaskier had to get back to his life, after all, such as it was, though the restrictions on his activities kept closing in around him. It had been much more difficult than Yennefer had expected to walk away from Geralt, and from the strangely compelling cast of characters that made up the rest of the Keep’s occupants-- and from Ciri, to whom Yennefer felt drawn in unexpectedly maternal ways.

Surely that wasn’t the solution to the problem of her lack of agency in her own reproductive capabilities, but she did feel strongly bound to this girl, and that couldn’t be-- well, she’d have to do some experimentation, once she had a few spare moments, and-- 

She’d felt so savagely jealous of Triss Merigold, in that moment, as they’d reached out for one another to generate the portal network, and Triss had been standing squarely on the cracked flagstone courtyard, happily installed-- how did _Triss_ get to make a home there and not _her_ \-- and it was nonsense, because it was a ruin in a remote mountain and Yennefer had important things to do and connections to maintain and a network to run and she didn’t have time to get exiled to the mountains.

It was clearly her sex hormones at work, there, because she’d had the best sex of her life for two nights running and wanted more of that. 

So, Geralt was out of reach, but Jaskier wasn’t, and tonight she’d stolen him out of his wretched little bunk in university staff housing and managed to conduct an experiment that had yielded the valuable scrap of data that if you managed to fuck Jaskier to orgasm purely from prostate stimulation you could get him to absolutely dissolve in the most stunningly beautiful tears, and he was presently a complete sobbing wreck in her bed. It was beautiful, but he had rather quickly moved into a self-conscious state that was less attractive and somewhat distressing.

“Shh,” she murmured, smoothing her hand across his back and pressing her cheek against his head, his face buried in her shoulder. “It’s all right. Let it out, darling.” She wasn’t normally the type to be a shoulder to cry upon, but she’d done this to him more or less on purpose and she was aware that if he just bottled it all right back up he’d possibly give himself a stroke. And even now, as he tried to curl himself tight enough to disappear, there was still something delicious and beautiful about him-- about his pain, perhaps, and she was willing to put up with a bit of pathetic sniveling to get at it.

“Nn,” he said, trying to talk even now, “I didn’t-- you didn’t--”

“Believe me, darling,” she said, “I’m getting what I need out of this, or I’d already have killed you.”

That made him laugh, which opened the door to let out a sob, and she kissed the top of his head and held him, petting his hair while he melted. She _was_ getting what she needed, was the thing. She hadn’t exactly expected this but she hadn’t not, either. 

He was so _delicate_. He was just a human, an intensely vulnerable one, and his quick wits were his only defense and those same quick wits meant he was smart and observant enough to have caught a lot of damage, in his time, from people who meant to hurt him or who didn’t care about him or care how delicate he was, and he was exquisite and fascinating and all she really wanted to do was to crack him and gently suck out all the pain and then fit him carefully back together and wrap him up in protective padding so that nobody else could break him.

She was experiencing a lot of possessive feelings and she knew most of them were slightly mislaid impulses about that damn Witcher and his damn Child of Surprise and she was going to have to do something about that, but in the meantime, the bard was a good outlet. The Redanians were quite sure they had him protected but she felt more direct attention from her was still warranted. 

And the other thing he was good for was that she could finally have her feet warm with him in her bed. She liked that, and she liked the way he smelled and the way he curled up in his sleep and the way he smiled sleepily at her when he woke in her bed. She was just… _fond_ of him, and it felt good to indulge herself and have something like that in her life. 

She still missed Geralt, with all the slightly-burny Djinn-amplified resonance on top of that, but all of that was going to have to wait for the current situation to resolve itself somewhat. She was back in circulation, now, back in political discussions, and it was going to be exhausting but this was what she’d been trained for. 

She had a side, now, and it was her own side, but it incorporated other people and that made it more interesting.

Jaskier settled down eventually, and fell asleep. It was cute. Yennefer lay curled around him for a little while, but eventually she got out of bed and went over to her workshop and called Philippa. There were politics afoot, and she’d best keep her hand in.

* * *

Three days later, Yennefer woke out of a sound sleep to Jaskier’s panic. She jolted upright, focused on that ring she’d given him, and realized immediately that this was not him having a bad dream or being dramatic with a friend, this was genuine. 

He was blind, a hood over his head, and being moved, rapidly, somewhere-- he was being abducted, she realized, with a cold jolt that mingled terror and fury. She’d missed something! Someone had gotten through. 

She gestured practical clothing onto herself, threw herself through a portal to his rooms in Oxenfurt, and snarled in thwarted rage as she found the body of his secret service guardswoman, who had been expertly stabbed in the kidneys and had died silently. Someone who knew what they were about had done this, obviously. 

She sent messages to the secret service and to her other allies, simultaneously as she tracked the assailants. But she couldn’t get a fix on the ring. She should be able to, and she could tell he had it with him and had not left it behind-- it was still working, she could still get his impressions of events, and feel that he was terrified, but she couldn’t get a fix on--

Ah! Whatever magical encirclement was preventing her from reaching the ring slipped for a moment, and she got a flash of the ring’s location, down in the warehouses near the docks. But as soon as she saw it, it was masked again.

It was better than nothing. She sent another message to the secret services, useless as they’d been, and ran down to the warehouses, avoiding a portal because clearly a mage was involved, here. 

None of her allies had responded, but as she hesitated, scouting out the warehouses, she got a response from one of the mages in the network. _Location_? the message read, and she sent back a quick ping.

Triss sent back a response as well. _You know I can’t come, but what can I do?_ Yennefer sent her a copy of the magical key she was using to track Jaskier’s ring, with a note, _It’s masked from me but if you can see it tell me where_.

She could narrow it down to one block of warehouses.

They’d pulled the hood off Jaskier’s head, and he was looking around. “What’s this about?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

“The Witcher,” a man said, no one Yennefer knew. She captured the image of his face, slightly distorted in Jaskier’s vision, and saved it; perhaps someone else knew him. 

Jaskier’s eyes welled immediately and convincingly. “He’s dead,” he said. “I saw him die. It was horrible!”

The man hit him across the face and Yennefer recoiled from the stinging slap; she was too close in, and it wasn’t helping her find him. Panicking was no good. Why would she be panicking? No, she was just so angry. 

“We know he is not dead,” the man said. “Where is the girl!”

“He’s dead,” Jaskier said, and sobbed. “I don’t know where you got your information! All I know is that he’s dead!”

Jaskier wasn’t taking in any particular information about his surroundings, which wasn’t helpful. Yennefer leapt and levitated herself onto the roof of the warehouse, running to the middle where a clerestory bank of windows gave ventilation. There was no light in this one, so he couldn’t be inside, but she paused, listening, just in case the space he was in was somehow enclosed.

“The girl,” the man was saying to Jaskier, “we have reliable reports of you and the Witcher traveling with the girl!”

“I know a lot of girls,” Jaskier said, sounding desperate, “but I don’t know which one you mean!”

The man slapped him again, and through his eyes now she saw a glimmer surrounding the man’s hand, a spell about to be cast, and with great resolve Yennefer leapt to the roof of the next warehouse. “I’ve had enough of this,” the man said. “You’re going to tell me the truth about the Witcher and the girl.” Jaskier was hauled up to his feet, and made a horrid little noise of distress.

Yennefer peered down through the clerestory of the next warehouse, vibrating with fury as Jaskier cried out. She couldn’t make out exactly what was happening to him-- likely he was being tied into a stress position of some kind. 

“Once this ruins your hands,” the man said, “perhaps you will repent of lying to me, but in the meantime--”

A portal opened nearby, and Yennefer felt the mental touch of another mage. It was the one of her allies who’d asked for a location, and come to her aid. Now she could recognize her-- it was Keira Metz, who she didn’t know terribly well but who had been at Sodden and now had answered her distress call in the middle of the night. She signaled to her, and Keira levitated herself to the roof next to her. 

“What’s going on?” she asked. She was in illusions, but Yennefer could see just enough through them to make out a smudge of soot on her cheek; she’d clearly been up late in her workshop doing something alchemical.

“The Witcher’s bard,” Yennefer said. “I believe it must be Nilfgaard, who has taken him, to interrogate him-- they believe he knows where Geralt of Rivia is.”

“Hm,” Keira said. Yennefer really didn’t know her well, and didn’t trust her entirely, but-- she _had_ been at Sodden, and that counted for something. “Remind me why Nilfgaard so badly wants to know where Geralt of Rivia is?” But then her expression shifted. “Oh-- the Cintran girl, she was his Child Surprise, so they must think he has her. Well, that’s-- I presume we’re concerned with saving the bard, for some reason?”

“He doesn’t deserve to die under torture,” Yennefer said through gritted teeth, and Keira tilted her head.

“I suppose that’s reason enough,” she said, with a shrug. “Catch me up on what you know?” And she shook out her hands and stretched a scrying spell between them for Yennefer to drop in whatever information she had.

Between them they got it narrowed down to the southernmost warehouse, and Keira checked the roof, then signaled confirmation. “If I go up,” she said, coming back to confer, “and you go in-- my combat tends to be pretty noisy.”

Yennefer dimly recalled Keira fighting with lightning at Sodden, and nodded. “I’ll go in,” she said. “Can you hold a perimeter?”

“I certainly can,” Keira said. 

“Carefully,” Yennefer said. “There’s a mage involved, in there. I don’t know him, but he has to have been, to do this.”

“Understood,” Keira said. She went back up to the roof and Yennefer felt a whisper of power as she cast a perimeter of spells down around the building, with a conspicuous entranceway for Yennefer to make her way in.

Yennefer quickly constructed an illusory self, and sent it in before her, to scout and to draw attacks. Jaskier was screaming now, and she had to ignore all of it but the bare fact of the sound, which led her to the corner of the warehouse, where there was a sort of box stall built in.

Her illusory double crept along the edge of the warehouse, keeping to the shadows, and Yennefer crept along a distance after it, a knife in one hand and her cloak in the other, ready to attack.

Someone hissed, “-- ‘s coming,” she caught. 

“You know what to do,” a man’s voice answered, and the light went out. Jaskier had stopped screaming. She’d long since had to stop listening in through the ring, lest she lose her composure entirely. She followed along a little ways after her shadow, waiting, and in a moment was rewarded by a thug leaping out of the lee of a wall onto her illusion, a knife flashing downward violently into it.

The complete lack of resistance from the illusion meant the man’s knife whooshed through it and he went staggering, so Yennefer leapt onto him in turn and cut his throat before rushing at the figures around the wall.

Jaskier was bound with his wrists over his head, dangling from the support pole between the inner wall and the exterior wall of the warehouse, with a weight affixed to his feet, and another thug was hauling on the rope around his wrists to hold tension as a man stood before him with a knife. The thug let go of the rope and Jaskier fell, but Yennefer was busy dealing with the thug. She had thrown her cloak over him as soon as she’d seen him, and he fought and thrashed his way free just in time for her to knife him, with a bit of magic behind it that sent him crashing backward with smoke rising from him. 

The other figure was surely the sorcerer, and as he spun to face her, she was certain she’d never seen him before. He was a stranger. She leapt at him as he threw a spell at her, her own defensive spell already prepared, and his own spell rebounded on him with a crack and a bright flash that sent him flying backward, crashing through one of the interior walls. 

Yennefer pursued, knife ready, but the sorcerer fled instead of attacking her, casting a transport spell and leaping immediately through it. She shouted furiously, and cast a spell after him, but knew it wouldn’t be effective-- but, as his transport portal began to close, she saw blue lightning flashing in it and heard a howl of agony.

“Kiera,” she cried, and the other mage came down through the ceiling, cursing. 

“He got away,” Keira said. “I got him pretty thoroughly, he’ll be badly hurt, but I couldn’t get a fix on where he was going. I can try to follow!”

Yennefer was about to tell her to do so, but she paused, considering. He didn’t likely have a trap set up, but it could tip their hand, and she didn’t want to endanger Keira, who’d so kindly come to her aid alone among all her so-called allies. 

“No,” Yennfer said. “No, don’t chase him. We don’t know who he is or who he works for or where he might have gone, or who might be waiting there. You’ll know him again if you see him?”

“Yes,” Keira said, “I got quite a good look at that spell he threw at you, I’d recognize him or his work anywhere.” And she sketched out a hasty illusion, conveying the particular resonance of the unknown sorcerer’s magic.

Yennefer nodded thoughtfully, committing it to memory. “Thank you,” she said. 

Keira smiled. “Of course,” she said, and there was a slight smugness to it, and Yennefer knew now that she owed the other mage a favor-- but, honestly, it was just as well, it was better to have had the assistance. “Now, did you leave either of these two alive, for us to interrogate?”

“The second one, perhaps,” Yennefer said, and they looked, but the second thug was rigid, eyes wide, and smoke came from his mouth.

“A pity,” Keira said, poking him with one bare toe. Well, she’d been roused from her house in the middle of the night, it stood to reason she’d not have put shoes on.

Jaskier whimpered as he tried to sit up, and both sorceresses turned to look at him. “Jaskier,” Yennefer said, striding over to him. She set to work untying his hands, hissing slightly; the fingers were already purple, and several were dislocated. They’d attacked his hands first, it seemed. 

He cried out and she grimaced as she realized something was wrong with his arm. “Dislocated shoulder,” Keira said tersely. “Let me fix it?”

Yennefer nodded; she vaguely remembered that Keira’s special areas of interest included medicine. Jaskier whimpered again, then screamed, as blue light glowed and then flashed, but afterward he subsided, and his arm was at a much more natural angle.

“Yennefer,” he said, blinking at her through tears. “Oh, Yen--”

“Hush,” she said softly, pressing her hand briefly against his face. “Tell me everything. Did they say who they are or what they wanted?”

“They wanted to know what happened to Ciri,” he said. “And Geralt. They wanted--”

“Understood,” Yennefer said. “Did they say who they were?”

“The mage’s name was Rience,” Jaskier said. “But he didn’t say who, or why--”

“Can this wait one moment,” Keira said, “while I repair the tendon damage?”

“Who is this?” Jaskier asked, looking at Keira.

She smiled briefly at him, a show of teeth more than anything. “Keira Metz,” she said, and before she could go on, he gasped.

“You were at Sodden,” he said.

“I was,” she said, disarmed.

“It’s an honor,” Jaskier said. 

Keira blinked at Yennefer. “I suppose I see why you didn’t want him to die under torture,” she said. 

“He’s not all annoying,” Yennefer conceded. 

“Most of my function is decorative,” Jaskier said, his voice grating as Keira’s hands glowed blue and his fingers snapped back into position. He gritted his teeth.

“No strenuous activity for a week,” Keira said absently, “be careful for the rest of the month, if full function does not return at that point you’ll have to--” She paused. “Well, probably you can ask Yennefer to look at it, then.”

“I haven’t the same gifts as you,” Yennefer said, “in the healing department.”

“Give me another moment, then,” Keira said, and laid her hands directly on Jaskier’s shoulders.

The bard was fully-dressed, as if he’d been out somewhere in the middle of the night. He hadn’t been taken from his own bed, apparently. Yennefer would have to ask about that. He looked terrible, tears all down his face and his voice hoarse with screaming, and he was shaking. 

“I don’t know where to take you to be safe,” Yennefer said, considering it.

“I need to go back to where I was,” he said fretfully. “They won’t pay me if I don’t finish out the semester. I have so much to do. But I can’t work if I can’t use my hands.”

“I could hide him,” Keira said, as if he hadn’t spoken, “but if anyone was watching that, they’ll know who I was by the resonance of my attack on him at the end. I can defend myself but I don’t think I can keep him safe.”

“They’ll know I was involved as well,” Yennefer said. “I can’t shelter him. We can’t leave him here. But, the Redanian Secret Service is supposed to have been watching him, as well. I can appeal to the throne.”

“I can’t leave,” Jaskier said feebly. 

“I can appeal to the throne that you should get paid for your work as well,” Yennefer said to him. “They do have the authority to order that, and it’s their fault this happened.”

“But I,” Jaskier said, and paused with a gasp as Keira did something else.

“All right,” Keira said, “that’s all I can do for him. I think he’ll recover.”

“Thank you,” Yennefer said. 

Keira smiled, a little wryly. “It was more interesting than anything else I was doing tonight. I’ll send a report along to the others, at some point.”

“Wonderful,” Yennefer said. 

And with that, Keira snapped open a portal and left, and Yennefer was alone with Jaskier in a shabby warehouse with two dead bodies.

She knelt, and put her arms around his shoulders. “You’re all right,” she said. 

He was shaking violently, and put his face against her neck. “Yennefer,” he said. “Was it the ring? Could you find me because of the ring?”

“He was blocking it, whoever he was,” Yennefer said, “but yes, it was because of the ring that I knew to look in the first place, and because of the glimpses I could get when his control slipped that I found you.”

He sobbed once, tightly, shook in her grasp, and managed to say, “I knew it wasn’t stupid to leave it on.”

* * *

_You’ve really done it now, Julek_ , Jaskier thought bleakly, huddled in a dark room he couldn’t identify. _In way over your head._ Twenty years of cavorting with Witchers and mages and collecting intelligence and mingling with spies like it was a lark, always faking it to stay on top of things, had caught up, and while that strange blonde mage with her tits out had snapped his fingers back into place and yanked his tendons back where they belonged, his hands were numb and tingling and his shoulders ached in time with his heartbeat and his throat was torn up from screaming and he didn’t think he’d ever sleep again. 

Yennefer had whisked him through a portal, deposited in him in what seemed to be a storage closet, and vanished, telling him to be still and silent until she came back. 

He wasn’t wild about this, but he also wasn’t wild at the concept of anyone perceiving him in any way, for the nonce. He hadn’t pissed himself, but it had been a near thing, and only the fact that they’d jumped him on his way _back_ from the privies had saved him from that particular indignity. 

He hadn’t even been doing anything stupid. He’d been out playing at a session, hadn’t drunk much of anything, had come home, had gone to the privy to piss, and then was headed back to his own quarters to go to bed. He hoped the young woman he’d spotted tailing him was all right. There was no sense worrying about it, though; either she was dead, or she’d sold him out, probably. He was too tired to mourn either way.

He would never, never, never sleep again; the helplessness and terror of all of it, and his overwhelming fixation on not revealing that the ring on his broken finger was a magical surveillance device had been a really useful distraction to keep him from fixating on how important it was not to reveal the whereabouts of Geralt and Ciri. But now he could not stop touching that ring, touching the finger that was miraculously no longer broken-- and magical healing wasn’t _that_ good, he shouldn’t be _this_ recovered if he’d truly been as injured as he’d thought, had the mage who’d abducted him been using magical illusions to make him think he was hurt worse than he really was? And wasn’t _that_ a horrifying thing to be worrying about, now-- no-- 

He fought off what he well knew was a delayed panic attack, and spent a while with his head between his knees just breathing there in the total darkness, wondering how much of his life was illusions and how much hallucinations and how much--

_Stop thinking_ , he thought, and focused just on breathing, in, slow, out, and then there was a noise near the door and he jerked upright, flattening himself against the unseen back wall as the door creaked slowly open.

“Julian?” a voice said, in a whisper. 

It sounded like his sister. He tried to speak, couldn’t, tried again, and the light was dim around the edge of the door but he could make her out, the woman in a sleeping kerchief and a robe, and it _was_ , it was Tristina. “Tristina,” he managed to gasp.

She flung the door wide and came in and threw her arms around him, which was absolutely not what he had expected and so he flinched violently and almost wound up cracking his head against the wall. But she seized him with unanticipated strength and pulled him close. “Julek,” she sobbed, “Julek, she said-- oh, by the Goddess, please-- are you--”

“Tristina,” he said, _fuck_ , she _smelled_ familiar. He started to cry, then, because he couldn’t not.

They stayed like that for a few moments before Tristina recovered herself enough to wipe her face. “Julek,” she said, trying to compose herself. “She said you’d been tortured. Do you need a healer?”

Jaskier took a few deep breaths and tried to calm himself, wiping his face. “No,” he said, so hoarse as to be nearly unintelligible. “No, I’m-- the other mage healed me, I think, I just need--” He had to stop, covering his face, unable to hold himself together any longer. 

Tristina embraced him again and he let himself go for a moment, because if he didn’t he might explode entirely. She held him and rocked him like a child, and in his mind he went back thirty-some years and remembered how they’d clung together and wept like this as children. It had been so long ago, but his body remembered. 

“I missed you,” she said softly, after the fit had passed and he’d gone quiet.

“I missed you too,” he whispered. He had no voice. 

“I wished-- after Dad died--” She bit it off. “I understand why you didn’t,” she finished.

He sat up, pulling away slightly. “I did come home,” he said, in the whisper that was the best he could do. “The door wouldn’t open for me.”

She stared at him. “When?” she demanded.

He shook his head slightly. “Four, maybe five days after he passed,” he answered. “I came as soon as I could, and waited-- I tried the next day, as well, and Leshko told me not to try again.” Her face gave him his answer, and he sighed and slumped. “That was Mother.”

“That was Mother,” she agreed, face pinched in irritation. 

“So all this time,” Jaskier whispered hoarsely, gesturing with one numb hand, “you’ve thought I never came, and I’ve thought I wasn’t welcome.”

Tristina scrubbed her hands across her face and echoed his sigh. “Fucking hell,” she said, voice muffled in her hands. “I should have known. But… but I don’t know you, Julek, I haven’t known you since we were children. And I wouldn’t have-- but the mage said this was the safest place for you.”

“I should have guessed,” Jaskier murmured to himself. He hadn’t really thought about why Tristina was here, but it didn’t take much to put together that _here_ was clearly Lettenhove. “Ah, fuck.”

“No one needs to know you’re here,” Tristina said, and it was as though she’d suddenly drawn a veil of practicality over herself, her tone sharpening and her manner going brisk even as her hands stayed gentle on his arms. “The mage said she could put enchantments on so no one would see you, and I can-- I’ll explain something, somehow. No one will ask.”

“Don’t,” Jaskier croaked, suddenly distraught, “put me in my old rooms--”

“I won’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t. I-- the green suite, I’ll put you there, no one uses it. The children play there sometimes, and visitors-- but there won’t be visitors, it’s not the season for it anyway.”

It was true, there didn’t tend to be a great deal of visiting around in the winter-time. 

“The children,” he said softly. He’d never met them, none of them. He’d seen the older one, as a babe in arms, briefly-- but he’d never-- Hanna had written him, so he knew their names and how old they’d be.

Tristina looked at him. “Do you-- you can meet them, if you want. They’ll be-- well, they can’t keep a secret, but if we call you by a different name, it wouldn’t matter.”

Jaskier stared at her. “You’d,” he said. She tilted her head slightly, clearly not following his train of thought. “You’d let me-- see them,” he managed, with difficulty.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asked. He couldn’t answer, just closed his mouth, tears welling, and she put her arms around him again. “Oh, Julek. No, I’ve told them only good things about you. No matter what the scandals said, I-- you’re not-- I don’t know you, Julek, but I _know_ you.”

**Author's Note:**

> For the moment, we end there; I have had for several months now about a half a chapter of Geralt's reaction, in which Lambert is A Treasure; if I can get my motivation up, I will make something of that. But things being what they have been, it's been hard to collect the necessary focus. Still and all, let me know what you think.  
> I know I've been off on other tangents and have a later-set half of series going on involving characters that weren't even in the Netflix show, but I always wanted to tie this back in. (I appreciate those of you who never looked at Witcher 3 and are gamely reading about Keira Metz anyway, _so_ much, I can't even say.)
> 
> Anyway it's been a hell of a year, and I won't say there was much good in it, but if you're reading this you've survived it, and if you've been reading along the whole time, at least we've had that together. Much love, from the bottom of my heart, to all of this fandom, and most especially to you.  
> Also much love to the Discord, which is a newish phenomenon for me, and especially love to [@some_stars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/some_stars/pseuds/some_stars) and [@anoke](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoke/pseuds/Anoke) for looking this over for me last night when I couldn't remember if I knew what I was doing or not. 
> 
> Please do say hi [on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17) if you're so inclined.


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